Chinese analysts have paid close attention to the concept of European strategic autonomy (ESA). This is largely motivated by China’s long-held vision of a multipolar world wherein Europe is defined as one major pillar. To better reveal the Chinese understanding of ESA, this research adopts a combination of bibliometric analysis and documentary analysis of Chinese scholarly literature. Two takeaways can be drawn from this study. Firstly, China’s perception or expectation of ESA in terms of goals, scope, and approaches differs considerably from Europe’s practice. Secondly, China’s attitude toward ESA has evolved over time and across different domains and has grown increasingly ambivalent. Although the overall China-EU relationship is unlikely to experience a sharp turn in the near future, Chinese policymakers should be more realistic and better prepared for major changes because the EU has been readjusting its China policy in its quest for ESA.

In an era of globalization, incumbents face strong incentives to attribute poor economic performance to external actors. While motivated reasoning explains how partisans update blame toward domestic incumbents, it remains unclear whether such blame is genuinely redirected to external actors beyond voters’ political control. Moreover, externalizing blame may signal limits to democratic accountability, with potential consequences for democratic belief. This article advances an asymmetric blame-shifting argument and tests it with two pre-registered survey experiments conducted on Amazon MTurk following the 2022 US midterm elections (n = 802; n = 999). Exploiting President Joe Biden’s attribution of rising inflation to Vladimir Putin, the experiments show that blame-shifting cues polarize partisan evaluations of the domestic incumbent: Democrats reduce blame toward Biden, while Republicans intensify it. In contrast, blame attribution toward the external actor remains largely unchanged across both studies. Study 2 further provides limited but suggestive evidence that exposure to external blame narratives may weaken democratic belief among opposition partisans. Together, the findings indicate that elite blame-shifting operates asymmetrically, which intensifies domestic partisan polarization without redistributing blame across borders, and such asymmetry may further erode democratic legitimacy.

Very few political science graduates go into politics. While choosing a different career track may be a matter of personal preference or context, the extent to which political science prepares students for political careers is questionable. This article seeks to explore that question by analysing how political science prepares students for activities within political parties. It draws upon semi-structured interviews conducted with political science students or recent graduates who are party members in Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We find that political science courses have a positive impact on students’ activity as party members through providing them with a comprehensive theoretical basis and a holistic knowledge approach. However, access to the practical aspects of politics is limited in university courses, leaving students and graduates feeling unprepared for political careers. These observations are valid across the board, with few specific country-specific nuances.

The ideological fragmentation of women’s organizations is central to debates about the unity and effectiveness of global feminist activism. Existing datasets capture organizational presence and networks, but they neglect ideological orientations of women’s organizations. This article introduces the FEMPOWER dataset, covering the period 1980–2023 for around 9,000 women’s organizations active worldwide. FEMPOWER provides yearly country-level data on organizations’ size, reach, strategies, and ideological orientations, including neoliberal versus social justice, sameness versus difference, and intersectionality. Descriptive analysis illustrates regional and temporal variation in fragmentation as well as comparisons with other datasets from the same research domain. The dataset enables researchers to systematically examine how ideological fragmentation influences women’s empowerment and transnational feminist mobilization.

This research note presents BLUE_EP, the first dataset of municipality-level results of European Parliament (EP) elections. Our dataset covers the 2019 and 2024 EP elections and provides results for approximately 90,000 Local Administrative Units (LAUs) in the EU27 and 500 parties or lists in each election, along with a classification of all parties into political groups and broader political families. The dataset was constructed by collecting, harmonizing, and merging 27 national datasets, closely following the standard European and national GIS typologies for LAUs. To the best of our knowledge, BLUE_EP is the first dataset to support a uniform, Europe-wide analysis of local voting behavior in EP elections. To showcase the usefulness of our dataset, we combine BLUE_EP with European Commission data on population demographics and degrees of urbanization. Using the combined datasets, we provide fine-grained evidence for a widening urban-rural gap in voting behavior between the 2019 and 2024 EP elections.

The 2023 revision of the EU Horizontal Guidelines introduced a dedicated framework for sustainability-oriented cooperation agreements, marking the first systematic attempt to integrate environmental objectives into EU competition law. Yet, almost two years after they entered into force, DG COMP has not received a single request for informal guidance under the new provisions. This policy commentary explains this apparent policy failure by reconstructing the process through which sustainability concerns entered EU competition policy after the 2019 European elections and the European Green Deal. Drawing on historical-institutionalist process tracing, we show that the resulting adjustments were shaped by political urgency rather than gradual policy learning, and that the 2023 Guidelines reflected cautious compromise rather than transformative change. We then analyse why uptake has remained negligible: multinational firms face steep cross-border enforcement risks, particularly from jurisdictions such as the United States, where sustainability agreements can trigger antitrust liability. We conclude by assessing the EU’s strategic options (retreat, international convergence, or domestic regime stabilisation) and argue that the last of these offers the most realistic path.